CoSchedule: The Way to a Website Snob’s Heart

I’ll confess right up front. I’m a website snob. It’s an occupational hazard.

That’s why, when I came across CoSchedule’s website, I was smitten. The site is everything a modern website should be—clean, easy to read and navigate, with a delicious color scheme.

But you know what they say about beauty being skin-deep? CoSchedule’s beauty is bone-deep.

[Tweet “@CoSchedule’s beauty is bone-deep. #blogging #editorial “]

Enough teasing. Let’s get down to the facts. If you want a preview, here’s CoSchedule’s own two-minute summary of the product:

Schedule Your Posts—and More

CoSchedule is a WordPress plugin and web app that lets you schedule blog posts. But that’s not all. You can also schedule social media right inside your dashboard. That’s one of the features that makes it so great.

The Calendar shows all your activity at a glance.

Let’s start with the Calendar. Click to the image on the left to see the details. The Calendar shows you at a glance everything you’ve got going. Tasks are indicated with a checkmark beside them. Scheduled posts have a colored line at the top of their entry, along with the title, the category, and a percentage of how complete its task list is. A past blog post has a number of how many shares it’s had instead of a completion percentage. Scheduled social media posts are listed by time, and have a symbol based on where the message will appear. Non-blog post items (called content) also appear on the calendar with their tasks listed.

Editing and Socializing and Tasking

More glancing–everything you need for a specific post

The Edit Post window is connected with your post in WordPress. When you schedule the post here, it sets the scheduling in the actual edit post area.

Tasks are a very useful feature, and probably my favorite part of CoSchedule. When you set them, you determine what tasks you need to accomplish and when, such as writing the actual post or choosing photos. If you have repetitive tasks that you do routinely for every post, you can create a task template, and apply it to each post as you choose. As we saw earlier, the tasks you create appear on your calendar. If you have other people who participate in your blog, you can assign tasks to them.

Speaking of other people participating, I don’t want to leave out that aspect of CoSchedule just because I do a blog alone. The program is designed with shared blogging in mind; in fact, CoSchedule uses their own product to schedule their (content-rich and delicious) blog posts. Features such as the ability to assign an author to a post, and the comments area, readily lend themselves to multiple bloggers.

Heart and Soul, I Fell in Love With You…

The heart and soul of what makes CoSchedule unique and wonderful is the social queue. Right alongside the tasks, you can schedule what posts you wish to publish to which social media platforms. CoSchedule connects with Buffer to send out these messages.

Set up your social media platforms in advance, choose them on the fly.An instant post, courtesy of CoSchedule.

You begin by selecting for which social profile you wish to create a message, from the list you made when you set up the plugin. As you can see in this image on the right, CoSchedule automatically fills in shortcodes for the title and permalink. At any point in scheduling these messages, you can type in your own words in addition to or instead of the title shortcode. Choose the date and time for the message to be sent, and you’re good to go. What thrills me about this is I can schedule these messages ahead of time when I’m focused on this task, rather than later when I’m busy with other tasks. The plugin even suggests a schedule for these messages: same day as publish, day after, week after and month after. You even have the ability to set a custom date. Once your post goes live, you can check social shares from within WordPress.

And then there’s Click to Tweet. Wow. This feature is what drew me to CoSchedule in the first place. It’s a free plugin that allows you to insert ready-made tweets for your readers to use in sharing your message. How could that be any easier? Look at the beginning of this post and you’ll see what I mean. Like everything else related to CoSchedule, it’s quick and simple. Click where you want the tweet to appear, click the icon on your toolbar, type in the desired tweet, and that’s all.

I could go on rhapsodizing about CoSchedule’s blog, with so much knowledge-goodness crammed into every pixel until each post might explode, but you get the idea. I encourage you to experience the wonder that is CoSchedule for yourself with a free trial. Whether you’re a procrastinating blogger (like the person writing this) or a super-motivated one, you’ll find something to like.